"...our economic engineers have come up with and implemented ideas that would make even the most ardent objector of workplace drug screening reconsider his or her view. Case in point #1:National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200.00 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The good news is that didn’t increase oil demand. The bad news is it didn’t do anything to create jobs here."

If we had just one dynamic person in that room during these hearings we’d have heard another option: Restructure. Our currency needs to be re-valued, they need to issue one new dollar which is worth many, many, many old dollars. Back it loosely and temprarily to gold to ensure faith in the new dollar.

I have heard Davos say this several times and I don't see how that helps. Lets say we devalue the dollar 100 old $'s to 1 new $. How does this help? Everyone's debt will drop to 1/100th its current value but so will their savings and salary. Sounds like a net scratch that would actually cause a panic. Right now we don't have any Zimbabwe $100 trillion bills but a plan like this could cause a panic.

It's not the actual numbers on the bills or bank accounts that matter. It is if those numbers get repaid or defaulted. I say let the defaults begin as they should have starting with the big banks in 2008.

Can you imagine what might have happened if the banks failed and their illiquid paper (CDOs, CMOs, ...) got sold off to more solid financial institutions? The players that were risk adverse could have bought up that paper for $0.50 on the $1 and then would have been far more willing to write down the underlying mortgage 20% - 30%. It would have been a win-win. Can't have that because the Treasury Secretary might have hurt a few of his Wall St buddies bank accounts. Clearly putting the taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion in TARP, $160 billion in AIG, unknown billions at Freddie & Fannie, so the bankers can continue to rape society was a superior outcome.

in my opinion I think davos's point was to tie the new $ to gold because the fed can't print it, and therefore its value is more stable. And converting 100 old into 1 new is to make the currency numbers sensible, otherwise we may as well switch to Zimbabwean dollars. Might save on printing costs as I believe they have an abundance of them left over.

I read the title of this and just knew it had to be from Davos. It had Deninger's name on it, but the fiery rhetoric could easily had flamed forth from the pen of Davos.

Earthwise, I cracked up when I read what you'd wrote, because that article made me think of Davos too! Then, when I saw it was Denninger, I thought "well maybe calling Davos calling Bernanke a moron isn't so bad after all!"